Local Color : Reckoning with Blackness in the Port City of Veracruz

Abstract

The Caribbean port city of Veracruz is many things. It is where the Spanish first settled and last left the colony that would go on to become Mexico. It is a destination boasting the “happiest Carnival in the world,” nightly live music, and public dancing. It is also where Blackness is an integral and celebrated part of local culture and history, but not of the individual self. In Local Color, anthropologist Karma F. Frierson follows Veracruzanos as they reckon with the Afro-Caribbean roots of their distinctive history, traditions, and culture. As residents learn to be more jarocho, or more local to Veracruz, Frierson examines how people both internalize and externalize the centrality of Blackness in their regional identity. Frierson provocatively asks readers to consider a manifestation of Mexican Blackness unconcerned with self-identification as Black in favor of the active pursuit and cultivation of a collective and regionalized Blackness. “Local Color deftly questions assumptions about the nature of anti-Blackness in Mexico and will challenge scholars to conceive of the African diaspora in new ways.” — THEODORE W. COHEN, author of Finding Afro-Mexico: Race and Nation after the Revolution “Local Color is an exquisite feast of ethnographic detail, historical nuance, and deep attention to the significance of place.” — MARÍA ELENA GARCÍA, author of Gastropolitics and the Specter of Race: Stories of Capital, Culture, and Coloniality in Peru “Frierson’s smart conclusions suggest new tensions between the local and the national, and the cultural and the political, while raising questions about the future of a singular ‘Black Mexico.’” — LAURA LEWIS, author of Chocolate and Corn Flour: History, Race, and Place in the Making of “Black” Mexico